Humanity grows stronger as it experiences diseases- they will never cause extinction
Gladwell 95 (Malcolm, staff writer former NY chief for Washington Post, “The Plague Year,” The New Republic, 7/17)
Humanity does not face extinction from disease
Malcolm Gladwell, The New Republic, July 17 and 24, 1995
excerpted in Epidemics: Opposing Viewpoints, 1999, p. 31-32
Every infectious agent that has ever plagued humanity has had to adapt a specific strategy but every strategy carries a corresponding cost and this makes human counterattack possible. Malaria is vicious and deadly but it relies on mosquitoes to spread from one human to the next, which means that draining swamps and putting up mosquito netting can all hut halt endemic malaria. Smallpox is extraordinarily durable remaining infectious in the environment for years, but its very durability its essential rigidity is what makes it one of the easiest microbes to create a vaccine against. AIDS is almost invariably lethal because it attacks the body at its point of great vulnerability, that is, the immune system, but the fact that it targets blood cells is what makes it so relatively uninfectious. Viruses are not superhuman. I could go on, but the point is obvious. Any microbe capable of wiping us all out would have to be everything at once: as contagious as flue, as durable as the cold, as lethal as Ebola, as stealthy as HIV and so doggedly resistant to mutation that it would stay deadly over the course of a long epidemic. But viruses are not, well, superhuman. They cannot do everything at once. It is one of the ironies of the analysis of alarmists such as Preston that they are all too willing to point out the limitations of human beings, but they neglect to point out the limitations of microscopic life forms.
No immediate national security threat from infectious diseases
Jonathan Ban, Chemical and Biological Arms Control Institute, 2001, CBACI Study: Health, Security and US Global Leadership, www.cbaci.org/pubs/special_reports/number_2.pdf, p. 8 Threats to the health of the Western world, such as infectious diseases, are important concerns, but in most cases they are not immediate threats, whereas the health conditions affecting the residents in many countries are immediate. At their core, the national and the individual levels of analysis are essentially very different, though related, lenses through which to view health-security issues.
Multiple alternate causalities to disease
Jennifer Brower, science/technology policy analyst, and Peter Chalk, political scientist, Summer 2003, Rand Review, Vol. 27, No. 2, “Vectors Without Borders,” http://www.rand.org/publications/randreview/issues/summer2003/vectors.html
This year's outbreak of severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) in Beijing, Hong Kong, Taipei, and Toronto is only one of the more recent examples of the challenge posed by infectious diseases. Highly resilient varieties of age-old ailments— as well as virulent emerging pathogens—are now prevalent throughout the world. These illnesses include cholera, pneumonia, malaria, and dysentery in the former case and Legionnaires' disease, acquired immune deficiency syndrome (AIDS), Ebola, and SARS in the latter. In the United States, West Nile virus entered New York in 2000 and then spread to 44 states by 2002, and monkey pox struck the Midwest this June. In the latter half of the 20th century, almost 30 new human diseases were identified. The spread of several of them has been expedited by the growth of antibiotic and drug resistance. Globalization, modern medical practices, urbanization, climate change, sexual promiscuity, intravenous drug use, and acts of bioterrorism further increase the likelihood that people will come into contact with potentially fatal diseases.
Humanity grows stronger as it experiences diseases- they will never cause extinction
Gladwell 95 (Malcolm, staff writer former NY chief for Washington Post, “The Plague Year,” The New Republic, 7/17)Humanity does not face extinction from disease
Malcolm Gladwell, The New Republic, July 17 and 24, 1995excerpted in Epidemics: Opposing Viewpoints, 1999, p. 31-32
Every infectious agent that has ever plagued humanity has had to adapt a specific strategy but every strategy carries a corresponding cost and this makes human counterattack possible. Malaria is vicious and deadly but it relies on mosquitoes to spread from one human to the next, which means that draining swamps and putting up mosquito netting can all hut halt endemic malaria. Smallpox is extraordinarily durable remaining infectious in the environment for years, but its very durability its essential rigidity is what makes it one of the easiest microbes to create a vaccine against. AIDS is almost invariably lethal because it attacks the body at its point of great vulnerability, that is, the immune system, but the fact that it targets blood cells is what makes it so relatively uninfectious. Viruses are not superhuman. I could go on, but the point is obvious. Any microbe capable of wiping us all out would have to be everything at once: as contagious as flue, as durable as the cold, as lethal as Ebola, as stealthy as HIV and so doggedly resistant to mutation that it would stay deadly over the course of a long epidemic. But viruses are not, well, superhuman. They cannot do everything at once. It is one of the ironies of the analysis of alarmists such as Preston that they are all too willing to point out the limitations of human beings, but they neglect to point out the limitations of microscopic life forms.
No immediate national security threat from infectious diseases
Jonathan Ban, Chemical and Biological Arms Control Institute, 2001, CBACI Study: Health, Security and US Global Leadership, www.cbaci.org/pubs/special_reports/number_2.pdf, p. 8Threats to the health of the Western world, such as infectious diseases, are important concerns, but in most cases they are not immediate threats, whereas the health conditions affecting the residents in many countries are immediate. At their core, the national and the individual levels of analysis are essentially very different, though related, lenses through which to view health-security issues.
Multiple alternate causalities to disease
Jennifer Brower, science/technology policy analyst, and Peter Chalk, political scientist, Summer 2003, Rand Review, Vol. 27, No. 2, “Vectors Without Borders,” http://www.rand.org/publications/randreview/issues/summer2003/vectors.htmlThis year's outbreak of severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) in Beijing, Hong Kong, Taipei, and Toronto is only one of the more recent examples of the challenge posed by infectious diseases. Highly resilient varieties of age-old ailments— as well as virulent emerging pathogens—are now prevalent throughout the world. These illnesses include cholera, pneumonia, malaria, and dysentery in the former case and Legionnaires' disease, acquired immune deficiency syndrome (AIDS), Ebola, and SARS in the latter. In the United States, West Nile virus entered New York in 2000 and then spread to 44 states by 2002, and monkey pox struck the Midwest this June. In the latter half of the 20th century, almost 30 new human diseases were identified. The spread of several of them has been expedited by the growth of antibiotic and drug resistance. Globalization, modern medical practices, urbanization, climate change, sexual promiscuity, intravenous drug use, and acts of bioterrorism further increase the likelihood that people will come into contact with potentially fatal diseases.